


stare at what is horrible and forgive it

by hypotheticalfanfic



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Gen, Irene Adler in my head is Rekha Sharma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 07:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Joan doesn't ask, and Sherlock is grateful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stare at what is horrible and forgive it

He will die grateful that Joan never asks about her. Never again, not once, not after that first horrific time, not even a little. He will go to his grave wanting to send her thank-you notes every Thursday (and he makes a minor change in his will to ensure it before thinking better and calling the barrister back because she would think it was both morbid and silly) for not asking about her again.

Joan doesn’t say the name a single time, ever, and neither does he — not aloud, anyway. On some level, he thinks that the tenuous balance Joan allows, holds up, makes possible means she has forgiven him for something magnificent and strange, something he may never have done but is grateful to be absolved of anyway. If his father had his way, Sherlock would be mouthing the words along with his father, “most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us, and to all men,” starchy collar itching and his sister fidgeting silently and his mother sitting, not standing, out of breath and shaking.

Happily, instead, he practices with the handcuffs until he can pick them in seconds, and get out with only minor abrasions in the absence of a pick. He breathes in smog, breathes in subway air, breathes in the stenches of death and decay and violence; he breathes out thanks for Joan and for New York, for Alfredo and for an abundance of cable channels and for Ishak’s falafel cart three blocks northeast of the brownstone. It’s a better litany than all the ones he still remembers, as much as he’d like to be able to delete them like so many typos. New York City is a better cathedral, Joan a better saint, and she — Irene, he lets himself think every once in awhile, keeps it penned in his mind and trapped behind his lips — is a better…what? A better excommunicated saint? A better fallen angel, perhaps.

He never says her name (he thinks it when he cannot stop himself, as though the name is a talisman against something ineffable and unwanted), but she is in his mind all the time, jeering and second-guessing him and reminding him of details and things he missed and laughing low and cold and throaty when he ruins good things. She is many sensations, none of which is healthy or good or uplifting.

Sometimes she is (and neurologically it’s impossible but he swears it’s true) a harbinger of synesthesia, making colors taste and words reek and numbers leer at him, and that is when the drugs are most tempting because it goes away but never soon enough. She is the London skyline when heroin smears it into blurred nothing, she is the sticky sensation of swimming up from a stupor, she is searing pain and blood in teeth and he cannot make her shut up in his head, and every time Joan gives him a look that means she carefully isn’t asking, it hurts more and again, fresh like the first time.

When she died, after she died, during Hemdale, while he was spending hours in the pool (not trying to drown, regaining lung capacity, although they didn’t often bother to let him explain) and hours with Edison (learning about bees, not avoiding group, although the latter was a happy coincidence), he understood that she and the drugs would be linked forever in his mind and in his limbic system. It was illogical — he’d done the drugs before her — but even he couldn’t fight the brain’s decisions. 

—-

They never had sex. It seems strange to admit it, but it’s true, and if he had ever told anyone anything about her, they would most likely not have believed him (and he wonders idly if, if he ever tells Joan or Alfredo about her, if they will believe him, and he is surprised by the strength of his desire for them to, and by the calm assurance that floods him that yes, yes they will, the submissive’s instinct for the trustworthy kicking in like a sense of smell suddenly heightened by withdrawal). 

Instead, she smiled at him from the pages of Scotland Yard files and eluded him at every turn and then, and then, and then she was there like she’d always been there and she was holding things that lit and glowed and made things good — not good, but better — and he should have, he knows, turned her in (drug dealer, smuggler, thief, murderer, if only in an indirect manner, at least at first). But then the world was sweet and rotten and smelled strange and looked like cellophane stuck on the lens. 

And then she was always there, and it took more time than he will ever admit, even to Joan or Alfredo or (if he’s honest) himself, to realize precisely what was going on, to notice that her visits coincided with spikes in drug violence and unsolvable murders in junkie alleys. And when he realized it, he didn’t react at first, because reaction meant things would change, and he wanted, so much, to be clean and also to be with her, her thin brown skin pulsing against his, the funny bark of her accent as she told him all about growing up in Jersey, as she stroked long thin fingers through his hair, as he shivered and shook and wept through the sink and the rise. He always wanted it to end immediately and he always wanted it to last forever, for him to die in her arms and watch her go to jail.

Once she told him about someone who said that all problems come from wanting two things at the same time, and it stuck with him the way things said when he was high tended not to, and it wasn’t just because she was the one who said it but was also because in that phrase he heard himself encapsulated. He always wanted two things at the same time, and most of the time the two things had to do with her, with her and the drugs, with the drugs. He wanted to kill his father and also be reconciled, he wanted to die and also to live forever, he wanted to be normal and also to murder everyone he met, all the time, because he could and he could get away with it and no one would ever catch him, ever.

And when she died (chopped to bits, they wouldn’t let him see the report, he very nearly choked the doctor to death with shaking hands and only the drugs in his system kept him from going to jail and sent him to rehab instead), he wanted two things at the same time again. It’s possible he’s never stopped wanting those two things at the same time ever since.

—-

Sometimes Joan looks at him with a tease in her eyes, a smile in the crinkles at the corners of her mouth, and he feels her again, her disregard, her cold calculation masquerading as affection — and maybe it was, sometimes, affection, maybe, but he doubts it — and it hurts and sickens him and excites him all at once. It is in those times that he is cruelest to Joan, not out of ignorance or carelessness but because perhaps he believes that if he is cruel to her she will leave and not die and not leave him while also leaving him alone. And if she does, he will heal, because he has a theory that your heart can only shatter so many times in a lifetime, and he may be going for a record but it has to stop eventually.

But then she looks at him again, after he is cruel, and she’s not her, and he knows that, always knows that, even if he lets himself pretend to forget sometimes. And that is when he is kindest to her, because he is sorry, and because if he could say the words in a way that made sense he would explain. But he cannot. And so he doesn’t.

And when he is cruel to Alfredo (and, to be fair, often when he is cruel to Joan, too, and Bell, and Gregson, and witnesses, and hot dog vendors) it is, more often than not, because they are deeply invested in caring, and sometimes he wants that like breathing while also hating the concept — shades of her again — and he is cruel because cruelty is, in the end, a weak man’s response to fear.

—-

“She was allergic to peanuts,” he says once. It slips out. It’s not even completely true, because many people who are allergic to peanuts are in fact allergic to the oils or the skin or anything but the peanut proper, and even those numbers are wildly suspect given the mass psychogenic illness factor, but it comes out of his mouth anyway, quiet and calm and entirely without inflection.

And Joan, bless her, doesn’t react other than with a “hmm” as if Sherlock had told her his racing litany of thoughts on peanut allergies and mass psychogenic illness, connecting the modern upswing in peanut allergies to the dance hysterias in the Middle Ages and the false anthrax alarms in the United States. She instead turns to the ice cream man and asks for a scoop of Rocky Road for her and “as much chocolate as you can fit in a scoop for him,” with only a flicker of her eyes to show her amusement.

The ice cream is a celebration: six months since she’d left his side as a sober companion and returned as a sidekick, a bodyguard, a consultant, a partner. The month between the two events has been elided, forgotten, as has Sherlock’s severe downward spiral and the panicked phone calls Alfredo and Joan had traded trying to find him. No one mentions them, or that they found Sherlock safe at home in the brownstone, having fallen asleep tangled up in his own knots, too tired (angry/scared/hurt/betrayed/abandoned) to get out. No one says a word, and Joan moves back in as if she’d never left.

It is not the healthiest way to deal with this strange dependency he’s developed, nor is it the ideal lifestyle for someone of Joan’s talents, but it fulfills them. Joan’s deduction skills sharpen and broaden, and Sherlock finds her a rock of immutable, unchanging support at the same time she is being a contrary, argumentative sounding board. The combination is electrifying and intoxicating, and he has never been better. Alfredo’s calm and composure steady him, and Joan’s wit and fierceness give him wings.

—-

A few months later, he says, “She was murdered.”

Joan does react that time, not that he blames her. “Do you know who did it?”

He notes her word choice while trying very hard not to have a panic attack. Joan did not say “Did you solve it,” or “What happened,” because neither of those is helpful or especially telling. If he had solved it, which he hasn’t, he would have said so. If he wanted to tell her what had happened, which he doesn’t, he would have. Instead, and he is grateful, Joan asks a bigger and smaller question at the same time. He weighs, he measures, he finds the words wanting. Joan waits patiently, does not stare him down in her way, does not pressure or hurry him. He breathes in smog and the smell of baking bread, breathes out the words that swim up in him.

“Not specifically.” An answer he is proud of if only for a moment, because it is the truest way to say no and yes at once.

And Joan nods once, slowly, and offers him a taco. That is the last thing he ever says about her — aloud, anyway. He changes the subject to the historical significance of the cilantro on Joan’s chorizo-and-egg taco, and she half-listens as they saunter down the street, and sometimes these days his head is full only of himself. Sometimes she disappears and he doesn’t hear her for days at a time, and during those days he is torn, again and always, between wanting two mutually exclusive things at the same time.

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from "Snow and Dirty Rain" by Richard Siken]
>
>> We make these  
> ridiculous idols so we can pray to what's behind them,  
> but what happens after we get up the ladder?  
> Do we simply stare at what is horrible and forgive it?  
> Here is the river, and here is the box, and here are  
> the monsters we put in the box to test our strength  
> against. Here is the cake, and here is the fork, and here's  
> the desire to put it inside us, and then the question  
> behind every question: _What happens next?_  
> 
> 
> [Quoted prayer from the _Book of Common Prayer_ ]


End file.
